Starbucks raised eyebrows when it recently started offering coffee for $7 a cup. But that's nothing compared to a brew that goes for a hefty $50 per serving. Why does this coffee cost so much? Because the beans first have to be eaten, digested and then pooped out by an elephant. Apparently that's an exotic enough process to fetch a price of $500 a pound, making this one of the world's most expensive blends. The coffee is called Black Ivory and hails from Thailand. It was unveiled last month at a handful of luxury hotels catering to, well, the sort of people who can afford a $50 cup of joe. Quiz: The year in business "When an elephant eats coffee, its stomach acid breaks down the protein found in coffee, which is a key factor in bitterness," Blake Dinkin, who has spent $300,000 developing the coffee, told the Associated Press . "You end up with a cup that's very smooth without the bitterness of regular coffee.

The Persian Gulf crisis has given new life to Brazil's program to run its vehicles on sugar-cane alcohol instead of gasoline. Shortages of the costly sugar-cane fuel and an abundance of inexpensive foreign oil had turned Brazilians off to alcohol. But as oil prices have skyrocketed in the wake of Iraq's takeover of Kuwait, another look is being taken at one of the world's leading alternative fuel programs, called Pro-Alcohol here.

Re "Cuban Teen Makes Revolutionary Choice," Aug. 22: Agustin Gurza tells us that Laura Pina is not your average Cuban kid. That is an understatement. Her mother is an American expatriate (a prize for Castro's Cuba) and her father is a member of one of Cuba's most famous musical groups. Laura did not have to go into the country to cut sugar cane as most Cuban youths are forced to do. She can afford to pay dollars to attend nightclubs and buy $70 Levi's. And she says it's getting awkward?

Thank you for your article on alternative fuels. Your section on methanol puzzles me, however. You say its use puts formaldehyde into the air. I've been told by Los Angeles City's Fleet Services Department (which has been part of the state's test program for 10 years) that the use of a catalytic converter prevents this emission. Your article suggests methanol must be made from corn but it can actually be made many things; rice bran, sugar cane, garbage and much more. You state the technology presents daunting problems but actually methanol can be distilled in one's back yard and the mash that's left over makes an excellent cattle and hog feed.

California and the federal government want drivers to use more renewable fuels in their cars and trucks. That's where the trouble lies. The state and federal governments share a goal, but have adopted very different ways to reach it. The resulting conflict has contributed to a snarl that reaches from fuel pumps in Los Angeles to sugar cane fields in Brazil. Along the way, the dispute has divided environmental groups and the oil industry, pitting allies against each other. It's even possible that the conflicting policies, both aimed at reducing global warming, could actually make things worse, some scientists said.

In the new documentary "The Price of Sugar," Haitian immigrants are featured living in medieval squalor and their barefoot children work next to elderly men, cutting sugar cane on Dominican plantations that supply U.S. households. Their remote shantytowns are enforced by barbed wire fences and patrolled by shotgun-wielding guards. There's little medical care and barely enough food to survive. "There is no death worse than this," a worker named Jhonny Belizaire says in the film.

Federal efforts to protect growers of sugar beets and sugar cane epitomize everything that's wrong with U.S. farm programs. At times they've artificially raised the price of sugar, costing consumers billions of dollars; at other times they've stuck taxpayers with the bill for the surplus sugar production they've promoted. The fact that the sugar program is likely to survive the latest rewrite of the farm bill unscathed is a testament to how limited the bill's "reforms" are. Sweeteners are ubiquitous in processed foods, and sugar is the most popular by far. There are two primary sources in the United States: sugar beets, which are grown in parts of California (mainly in Imperial County)

It's doubtful that Mary Poppins would have extolled the virtues of sugar as a medicine chaser if she had known about the horrific plight of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic. According to "The Price of Sugar," a riveting new documentary from director Bill Haney, the migrant laborers there who cut down sugar cane are pressed into virtual slavery.

Ho Sai Gai, possibly the most decrepit Cantonese restaurant in California, once occupied this site. What a change. As Mandalay, the room has developed a lot of style: Banner-like drawings of Vietnamese maidens hang from the walls, banana trees are spotted around the room, the chair backs are in the shape of the letter M, for Mandalay, of course. It has an air that faintly suggests some low-profile, savagely exclusive nightclub.